


The Lives They Made

by imitateslife



Category: Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 11:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9233336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imitateslife/pseuds/imitateslife
Summary: It all seemed so simple to Igor now, as he studied his pregnant wife. You could not create life from death, but you could create life from love.





	

The house Baron Bomine gifted Lorelei was much too grand for a couple so used to cramped quarters. It smelled of clean linen and the roses Lorelei insisted upon growing just underneath the parlor window. The circus had smelled of unwashed bodies, shit, gin. Victor’s apartment had been a strangely sterile smelling home. Harsh soaps, the occasional smoke from a crackling fireplace. But both places had been home. And now, this, too, was meant to be Igor’s home. Of all the places he'd lived, despite its grandeur, this felt the most like home.

The wedding had been a small affair. A handful of Igor’s acquaintances from the hospital he now worked in; a few of Lorelei’s friends from Baron Bomine’s cabaret. The baron himself had given Lorelei away.

“Take care of my star,” he’d said to Igor at the reception, clasping him on the shoulder. “I know you will – of course you will!”

He’d let out a peel of high laughter; Igor, too, had laughed. He didn’t remember it in quite the same way, though Baron Bomine had recounted it many a time: the first time he had seen Igor had been in the circus. It seemed Lorelei and Victor weren’t the only ones to remember him from those days.

“You were a genius,” the baron had said many times over glasses of sherry as they talked of Igor and Lorelei’s impending wedding. “A pocket-watch! A _pocket-watch!_ And you saved her. You saved her life. You know, our lives would be emptier without her – yours and mine. Don’t think I love her as you do, my boy! Certainly not! But I care for her. And I know she will be happy with you. She is always happiest with you.”

That had been nearly a year ago. Igor had watched in awe as she moved towards him, adorned in the fine, white silk and lace. The off-the-shoulder neckline displayed her bird tattoo prominently and Igor was certain she would not have had it any other way. But her smile, her eyes, the excited way her fingers fidgeted with her bouquet were what made her really beautiful. And when they kissed in front of the sparsely filled church, they kissed with all the improper passion he remembered kissing her with the first time.

The way he still kissed her.

Though tonight, as he lay awake at her side – they refused to sleep separately as a proper couple might – he watched her sleep. She lay on her side, facing him. The open window cast bluish moonlight over her, making her night shift almost translucent. More than her pert breasts, the curve of her spine, her plush lips, the swell of her belly excited him. Day by day, she grew and needed her corsets refitted to accommodate the child inside of her. Igor had seen diagrams and autopsies of pregnant women. He could only imagine the alien form of their child inside her. By now, he imagined he or she had fingers and toes. A mouth. A brain. Eyes. He hoped their child had Lorelei’s eyes – bright blue and almond shaped, almost catlike. He hoped their child had her courage, her smile, her fondness for cartwheels in the halls. She’d lamented not being able to do them anymore with her cumbersome belly in the way.

“I almost can’t wait two more months,” she’d said, burying her face in the crook of Igor’s neck. “The nursery is ready – why isn’t the baby?”

“Don’t say that,” Igor said. “We want our child to finish growing. I want you both to be happy and healthy. And the best way for that to happen is for you to carry to full term…”

She chuckled, sighed. “My husband, the doctor. Whoever would have thought?”

She smiled up at him and their eyes searched each other for the unspoken history they shared. Sometimes Igor wondered if their child – or children someday – would ever know of their parents’ lives before they’d been born. Would their child know that its parents had been circus performers – outcasts – and accomplices to an unhallowed creation? It was another life – not only taboo, but no longer theirs to claim. Igor thought fondly still of Victor – and often – even though he had not heard from him since his disappearance from Castle Erskine. Two years ago, in fact. Nearly three. They’d left a vacant seat for him in the church at the wedding. Sometimes, that was how Igor thought of Victor – as an empty space in his life, fit for only one person. He wished Victor could see him now and wondered if his friend could look upon Igor’s life without jealousy. Preposterous, of course. Igor had never been blind to Victor’s intense dislike of Lorelei.

“He was jealous,” Lorelei told him once as she spread cream upon a homemade – rock hard – strawberry scone. “You do know that? He wanted all of you – your time, your attention, _you_.”

Igor frowned and sawed his knife against his own scone. He supposed he’d always know that, too. But each man had made his own choice in the end and Igor had no regrets. How could he? He had the wife he’d only ever dreamed might care for him and more love than he had ever known. He had a home – a real home. A job doing all that he loved. A child on the way.

Would Victor be jealous of that? The child?

Igor and Lorelei, in fits of passion – or perhaps on lazy Saturday mornings full of sloppy kisses – had created life out of nothing. They had made a person together, one that was very much alive if the swift kicks he or she delivered were any indication. And they would watch this person grow, become something more than his or her parents, _live_. It did not take a crack of lightning or stolen parts from charnel houses and graveyards. It took nothing more than love. How had such a simple solution never occurred to his friend?

More than once, Igor and Lorelei had discussed names for their child.

“I know you want to name it Victor if it’s a boy,” she’d confessed while snipping roses from the bush to adorn the dinner table. “But I’d much rather let our child have his – or her! – own legacy.”

That was one thing Igor had not been afforded. His name fit him, but it was not tailor made for him. It was a stolen jacket that hung about his shoulders and needed to be taken in just a bit. He nodded. He understood.

“But if it’s a girl,” Lorelei had said. “I do rather like Victoria.”

She smiled at him and he, too, smiled back, unbalanced. There was a determined look in Lorelei’s eye that told him she was serious. He could read her well, like his favorite book, over and over but still finding new things each time. Just when he thought he had her memorized, she surprised him.

And now they lay together in bed and she was peaceful. Unaware of the world around her or the way her husband marveled at her ever-changing body. As the first purple stripes of her stretched skin appeared, she had lamented them in the mirror.

“You’ll never want me like this,” she said. Her fingers ghosted over the stretch marks. “You’ll never look at me the same.”

Igor came up behind her and rested his chin upon her shoulder. His hands touched hers and together they traced the beautiful imperfections upon her body.

“You once told me,” he whispered. “That I was always beautiful to you – even as a dirty, twisted clown. D’you think I love you any less than you love me? I will want you and love you no matter what you look like.”

He brushed her long, black curls aside and kissed the tender places on her neck that made her shudder and sigh. If she ever doubted his love for her again, she never asked. Instead, they had excitedly talked about the child they were expecting and the future. They talked some of the past, in a haunted, secret way survivors of war might talk about their traumas.

“Imagine,” Igor said. “If you and I were having a child in the circus-“

“I would _never_ bring a child into that world,” Lorelei said viciously. She sat up and turned from the fire to face Igor. “Our child deserves a better life than we had. I could never have lived with myself if I subjected our child to the cruelties of that place.”

He nodded guiltily, kissed her temple. She nestled back against him. Then, quietly she spoke.

“If you and I had conceived a child in the circus, we would run,” she whispered. “I don’t care where. Anywhere. And we would have built a life.”

“We wouldn't have- I could never have-“

“You could have,” she said. “And you would have. We would have run anywhere on earth, you and I and our child. In any world, in any lifetime, I would want you to know your child and to be safe and loved. But we never have to worry about that place again. We have a home, we have a life. And our child will never suffer as we did. I won’t allow it and neither will you.”

They’d slept in front of the fireplace, drowsy from the heat. But now, on a different night as Igor studied Lorelei’s soft curves and imagined their child forming in her, he couldn’t help but to reach out and place his hands upon her belly.  He slid down upon the bed so that he was eye level with the bulge that was his son or daughter. Even though he’d postulated about a child born to them in the circus, back then he’d never dared to dream of having a child. Lorelei was right: he could never have subjected a child to the life he had known. He never wanted his child to know want or hunger; abuse or neglect. He never wanted his child to feel like less than a person. At times, he foolishly feared that his son or daughter would share his deformity. It had been an abscess that caused his spinal deformity – not genetics. And yet, the fear sometimes knifed through his throat, his lungs, and made it hard to breathe. But in the still of the night now, Igor was filled only with awe and wonder. No fear. He stroked a thumb across the soft cotton of Lorelei’s nightgown. He wished for it to be stripped away so that he could touch her skin, so that father, mother, and child were all connected. He pressed his lips to Lorelei’s stomach and imagined that his child could not only hear him, but feel him and understand him.

“You are wanted,” he whispered. “And so loved already. Nothing is going to harm you. Nothing at all… _Victoria_.”


End file.
